Coming back to this a long time later. I figured it out a little bit after I posted this. I wasn't aware that q.try_run() within the nfqueue module was a blocking call https://www.wzdftpd.net/redmine/projects/nfqueue-bindings/wiki/Examples. I'm not sure I was even aware of what it meant to be blocking vs nonblocking. Either way, someone from #python looked at my code and told me nfqueue is a blocking call and I should look into something like twisted.
Twisted is a complex module but I spent a bunch of time looking at it and eventually had some working code implementing the absolute bare essentials as I needed them to go asynchronous. This question eventually progressed into https://github.com/DanMcInerney/LANs.py. Speaking of network concurrency, my recent project has been from a web scraper point of view and I think gevents+requests or gevents+mechanize are the way to go for that somewhat-related topic. erequests won't import due to a bug, grequests has no way to handle exceptions in the fetching of responses, treq can't find and fill out form logins (maybe with a POST, haven't explored that route), and scrapy is way too big and complex for my latest project (https://github.com/DanMcInerney/shodan_pharmer), eventlets I'm sure CAN work with libraries other than urllib2 but it implements and imports its own urllib2 and it is not a favorable time:effort ratio for me to try and implement that.
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